Saturday, February 11, 2012

AVWW Beta 0.574 "Ducking And Warping With Friends" Released!

This one has more bugfixes and balance tweaks, but also three major new features. Oh, and the non-HUD parts of the GUI have been majorly upgraded once again, too.

The first is one that players have been clamoring for for a while, but which I've not been too enthused about: the ability for your character to duck, and even duck and slide with a bit of momentum. I've finally come around to the idea, though, and now that I see it in the game it is pretty cool. I'm still really more of a jump-to-avoid kind of guy, but it's nice to have options.

The next big feature is the new warp mechanics. Be sure and read the release notes about those, but the general idea is that warp potions (that you carry around) are gone, and warp stones (that you find in the wild and visit) are replacing them. In other words, this is becoming a little more traditional for the genre in terms of the warp mechanics. This has many various benefits, which are explained in depth in the release notes.

Multiplayer Graduates From Opt-In Alpha
The third major new feature is CO-OP! We've had the multiplayer in an opt-in alpha state for months now, and some servers have been getting quite a bit of use. Toll's server in particular has been the go-to destination for beta phase 2 public play, I have to say.

Please see the release notes for all the details on the co-op updates, too, but the short of it is that we finally have movement smoothing in, and so huge swathes of gameplay now perform just like you'd expect rather than jerking around. There are still some known bugs, but these are just little isolated glitches that we need to clean up, not anything to do with fundamental architecture anymore.

So that's why we're moving the co-op up to beta status, and no longer requiring people to opt in to it: now it's just a matter of squashing isolated small bugs with the multiplayer for it to be 1.0 ready. Oh, and of course some new features like a server listing and some anti-griefing admin controls are things we also want to add before 1.0. It's a real relief to have the core there and working so well, though.

It's also really refreshing to see our remaining to-do list for beta phase 2 dwindling like it is. Lots to do next week, but then we should be moving into beta phase 3. More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the
in-game updater itself, if you already have 0.500 or later. When you
launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found
if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have 0.500 or later, you can download that here.